Big Game Bonus Video: Funday Football
Nathan has been getting really into gridiron lately since Aussie Rules is in a slump or something, so we pulled out an oddity that was floating on the very periphery of The Future is a Dead Mall.
Edit: a Patreon-player version is processing and should auto-publish once it's ready. The direct YouTube link is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyG7zwLarrc
Comments (15)
Would love some more sports content from Dan especially some shorter form stuff there’s so much about sports that is deeply interesting that has nothing to do with the sport itself
I will say as a Jags fan a lot of us out-of-state did watch the truly terrible Funday broadcast because it was on NFL+ and Disney+ versus ESPN+ for the regular broadcast (easier to stream and also pirate). It was, as you described, horrific and impossible to follow, but so is my true love—the Jags.
I don't know if there's a name for that feeling where you haven't been in a physical mall for a few years and you go and it's weird, or you go to visit your girlfriend's parents and they have cable and you haven't watched cable TV for years and it's weird, but learning that this is a thing that exists gives me that exact feeling.
(Copying my youtube comment, with grammar fixes and language that YouTube actively censors lmao) Honestly, the whole "Simpsons Bowl" stunt was kind of refreshing, in a weird way. In an era SO saturated with insidious marketing ploys that try to sucker audiences by pretending to be "for your health" or "for a chance to win" or "for faith," this was just two purely corporate entities saying, "hey, cards on the table: these are two popular things, both of which have been made possible through tremendous technological refinement, and here's a weird goddamn experiment where we try to smash them together that we know rationally will probably fail." And... it didn't, but not in a "it made trillions" way, but just a "people vibed and had fun, Mika KILLED it with the energy, the animation looked stupid but it's The Simpsons where they've acknowledged their show looks kinda off model since before S1, and holy shit that INTERCEPTION" way that felt genuine through the corporatism! It's almost tragic how all it takes to appeal to a customer base that wants this stuff is a little humility and honesty, and the fact that these experiments haven't really been repeated and corporate failures/risks since 2023 are now clearly never intentional except as feints to distract from oligarchic takeovers of world governments and human rights abuses that would make Henry Ford ask "hey is that actually ok?" is... it's not just evil, but sad.
For the non-Australians, Aussie Rules has the highest per-capita attendance of any sporting league in the world. The season takes up about 60% of the year, so when you include the pre-season ramp up and the post grand final glow it consumes almost 9 months of every year in some capacity. That leaves a 3 month hole where there is no content, which leads to many fans suffering from withdrawal. If you’re outside Australia you can definitely get into it, but in my strong opinion it is easier to fall in love watching it live. It is a fast game played on a very large field with no restrictions on where players can move or pass the ball. The TV direction has definitely improved (not in the way Dan is highlighting here, there simply isn’t enough dead time for lots of slow-mo replays etc), but it’s a difficult game to capture on a small screen.
Aussie Rules Football is actually one of only two sports I've ever watched live in a big stadium (the other being baseball, more recently). Both of these happened because I was temporarily living in the country where these sports have huge cultural significance, and I knew very little about the sports themselves. Both were fantastic experiences because of the stadium crowd enthusiasm and the people I was with. Really made me understand sports watching as a collective experience in a way no broadcast ever has.
I'm guessing this is the same tech that's used for tactile broadcast accessibility devices like the OneCourt, which is a much cooler use of it than replacing the players with 3D models doing canned animations.
well this was fascinating
In case people are heaving trouble opening it on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyG7zwLarrc
For anyone who can’t get this to load in the app - view patreon in the web browser and follow through to watch it on youtube (hidden video)
I know by now that every time Dan posts a video I will learn some new, unspeakable Canadian pronunciation of a word, but I wasn't ready for "behemoth" to hit me in the first five seconds.
You just have to watch it on YouTube directly. If this video is public you’ll have a million views by tomorrow.
Big Oblong strikes again
The NFL doesn't want us to see this video it seems
"Video unavailable: This video contains content from NFL, who has blocked it from display on this website or application" —edit: can't play on Patreon but apparently plays on YouTube....